How a Tar Heel Southerner discovered the South

Saturday

Mar 18, 2017 at 10:00 AM

Book review: Jennifer Ritterhouse's "Discovering the South" follows the writing of Jonathan Daniels' famous 1938 book.

By Ben Steelman StarNews Staff

On May 5, 1937, Jonathan Daniels, the 35-year-old editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, got in his black Plymouth and drove west on N.C. 54. It was the first leg of a six-week journey that would take him through most of the states of the Old Confederacy.

Daniels had a contract with Macmillan to write the book that would become "A Southerner Discovers the South" (1938). Little known today, the Daniels book is regarded as on par with James Agee's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" and Erskine Caldwell's "You Have Seen Their Faces" as a portrait of the Depression.

Among the book's fans -- with some reservations -- is Jennifer Ritterhouse, an associate professor of history at George Mason University. In "Discovering the South," she takes a closer look at Daniels' book, and his unpublished diaries, to create a picture of the South at a crucial time in its history.

Daniels was an exceptionally competent journalist, as later books such as "Washington Quadrille" and "The Time Between the Wars" would show.

And as Ritterhouse shows, he did not waste his six weeks off. He talked with almost everyone, from mill owners to union organizers, from tenant farmers and Tuskegee professors to Margaret Mitchell, whose "Gone With the Wind" was still a best-seller. (Mitchell, however, wouldn't allow herself to be identified in the book or quoted for the record.)

The South was a very different place then. Two-thirds of the population was rural. Small farmers were having to scrape by on less than $600 a year, while tenants and sharecroppers (of whom there were millions) made even less. Literacy rates, infant mortality and other statistics more resembled Venezuela or Bolivia than the rest of the Union.

Change was in the air, thanks to New Deal programs such as the Tennessee Valley Authority. (Even more change would come with the massive infrastructure investments made in the region during World War II.)

Ritterhouse, however, is most interested in Daniels' attitudes on race, which she argues began to shift during his trip.

Jonathan Daniels loved his old man and adopted his general populism, but the two were very different. The elder Daniels was a Methodist and a teetotaler who banned liquor from U.S. warships as secretary of the Navy. The younger Daniels loved his liquor and wrote an experimental novel in which Lucifer, the fallen angel, is the hero.

Thus, when he took over the News & Observer's editorial page, Daniels came out against lynching and wrote in defense of the "Scottsboro boys," nine black men in Alabama who had been wrongly convicted of rape in rushed trials by all-white juries.

As Ritterhouse notes, however, Daniels was a "Southern" liberal -- or, implicitly, a Southern white liberal. He accepted the notion of separate but equal; once, he was scandalized when a white Chapel Hill professor had lunch publicly with a black man. Still, he wanted the "equal" part to be more than a cruel joke.

On the road, though, Daniels' began to see that racial prejudice was separating blacks and working class whites, even though both had plenty in common and could benefit by collaborating. By the 1950s, Daniels would use his newspaper pulpit to urge compliance with school desegregation and to oppose "massive resistance."

Ritterhouse criticizes Daniels for failing to speak to many blacks on his trip and she clearly bristles at some of his sexist remarks. Still, the portrait that emerges is of a man willing and able to change his mind.

Reporter Ben Steelman can be reached at 910-343-2208 or Ben.Steelman@StarNewsOnline.com.

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